It is always fun to get good news from the New York Times, which always try to spin the data so it doesn’t look too bad for Democrats. A case in point: “Share of Democratic Registrations Is Declining, but What Does It Mean? Virtually every group of voters under 70 has become less likely to register as Democrats compared with Republicans since 2019.”
The heading and subhed pretty much tell the story, but here is more:
Newly registered voters, who are disproportionately young and nonwhite, have tended to lean Democratic.
That’s been less and less true during the Biden era.
A majority of states ask people to select a party affiliation when they register, and last year newly registered Democrats made up only about 53 percent of those who chose a major party — beating Republican sign-ups by a narrow margin of 26 percent to 23 percent of total registrations — according to data from L2, a nonpartisan voter data vendor.
***
The party’s underperformance among newly registered voters is all the more striking given the demographic makeup of the new registrants. Half are younger than 30, and half are nonwhite. Yet they’re less Democratic than the older and whiter voters already registered in these same states with party registration.And those states with party registration are more Democratic than the nation as a whole — they voted for President Biden by nine percentage points on average in 2020. So if Democratic registrations have only a three-point edge in those states, that might not bode well for the party nationwide.
The Times considers several possible explanations for the Democrats’ sluggish showing with new voters:
Why are Democrats doing so poorly among newly registered voters? Unfortunately, it’s hard to say.
Here is a possible explanation the Times doesn’t consider: the Democratic Party has gone batshit crazy, and most young voters aren’t that nuts. Here is another one: the Democrats’ obsessions with transsexuals, illegal immigrants, reparations and squelching free speech offer nothing to blue-collar voters, especially minorities. The real question isn’t why voters are abandoning the Democrats, the real question is why it isn’t happening faster.
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.